Leadership Quote by John Adams

Adams sounds less like a pious revolutionary here than a wary media critic watching a rival platform outperform his own. The line is a catalog of sensory power: eye, ear, imagination. It’s not theology he’s measuring; it’s the technology of persuasion. In Adams’s view, the old church’s strength is aesthetic and theatrical, built to capture attention and hold it. The bite comes from his choice of targets: not the learned, not the devout, but "the simple and ignorant". That phrasing carries the era’s patrician edge, but it also reveals a strategic fear: mass loyalty isn’t won by syllogisms. It’s won by pageantry, music, ritual, architecture - an immersive system that makes belonging feel inevitable.

The subtext is Protestant America trying to define itself against Catholic Europe while worrying it might not be able to. Adams isn’t only sneering at superstition; he’s acknowledging how hard it is to compete with beauty when your brand is plainness and inward conscience. That’s why Luther matters. The Reformation becomes, in Adams’s framing, an almost impossible act of un-hypnosis: breaking not merely doctrines but the spell of an entire sensory order.

As a president in a young republic, Adams also reads like someone thinking about governance. If institutions can "charm and bewitch" populations, then political legitimacy is fragile, and the public sphere is vulnerable to spectacle. The line lands because it’s grudgingly honest: reason may be the Enlightenment’s ideal, but enchantment is the operating system.